Kick starting a movement against mass surveillance

Next week will see a public meeting in London discussing what we can do about the rise of mass government surveillance. Anthony Barnett outlines why this is a crucial issue, and why you should be there.

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We are sleepwalking into despotism.
Especially here in Britain. The fact of the nascent despotism is
obvious. The UK state is developing systems of total surveillance to
collect the metadata that maps the pattern of everyone’s
relationships, movements, reading and communications. At the same
time it is creating
secret courts that will protect its use of these once
unbelievable powers from legal challenge. The British state is not
yet characterised by a modern, high-tech despotism. But undeniably
this can happen and, equally undeniable, this is the direction
the state is taking. The puzzle is not, therefore, whether we are so
threatened but why, given that we are, there is so little alarm or
objection. Why is the British public a country of sleepwalkers? What
is the reason for our collective catalepsy?

For some years now Henry
Porter has distinguished himself as a columnist in the Observer
with his well-researched and persistent attempts to arouse the public
to wake up to the threats to our liberty. Also as a novelist: The
Dying Light (The Bell Ringers in the US) published four
years ago is the first fictional account of government by drones and
mass electronic surveillance. And also too as an audacious organiser,
as I well know as his Co-Director of the Convention
on Modern Liberty. Now, more or less single-handed, Porter has
put together a public meeting this coming Monday, 4 November. As
literary London will congratulate itself by awarding the Samuel
Johnson prize in the great hall of the RIBA at 66 Portland Place, the
spirit of Samuel Johnson will be with those of us below ground
debating mass surveillance and supporting the editors of the Guardian
and Der Spiegel as they discuss what they are exposing, why
they are doing it, and how the authorities are seeking to stop them.

The central purpose of the meeting is
to start the fight back against the authorities’ attempt to close
down the publication of the Edward Snowden revelations, and to do so before the
attack on the Guardian, now being accused of ‘treason’, begins
in earnest. Can the public be aroused to refuse submission to the
surveillance state?

To achieve this the first step is to
get our arguments clear and concise. How, for example, to best put the
case set out with such force by Quentin Skinner in the final answer
of his
recent interview: that the very fact of possible surveillance itself takes
away our liberty and creates self-censorship whether or not our
privacy is in fact infringed. I was forced to focus on this at short
notice when asked to
go on the BBC’s Newsnight. The heart of the package was a
gripping interview of Glen Greenwald by Kirsty Wark designed to
expose him as an activist rather than an objective journalist. He
emerged triumphant in a series of exchanges that have gone viral.

The experience taught me that the first
line of defense of the security establishment is denial. As they see
it, they do not indulge in the total reconnaissance of metadata, they
are only collecting as much evidence as they can in order to identify
and hunt down terrorists. Mass surveillance is just a means to this
end. The innocent can relax. Their interest is only in the needle and
not at all the haystack.

Speaking as part of the haystack I am
willing to take their protestations of good faith at face value. I
don’t think they are going about creating a Stasi state
deliberately in order to identify and intimidate every single
potential trouble-maker. What they do not countenance however is that
this will be the consequence of their efforts. By surveying those who
are not under suspicion they turn us all into suspects. Indeed
innocence itself can become a liability (Why is this man not
accessing pornography? Is he trying to make sure he can't be
blackmailed? Better keep a close eye on him!)

It is essential to repeat and repeat
again that the Snowden revelations are not about exposing how the
authorities identify terrorists through the use of surveillance. No
one is against focused and legally warranted tracking of criminals.
What is being brought to light is the abuse of power by the
agencies to spy on friends, manipulate opinion, pressure legitimate
dissent and create a climate that makes us afraid even of our own private actions.

Second, it is quite extraordinary how
despite all the evidence, the British authorities presume their own
integrity and rely on the public to trust them. Jenni Russell, in an
exceptional
piece behind Murdoch’s paywall in the Sunday Times, catalogued
the recent corruption and failures of the forces of the state as they
abuse their power to stitch up those who cross them or expose their
incompetence. Once the capability is there it will be misused and the
police cannot be trusted with it. As Duncan Campbell pointed
out to a large audience in the Westminster establishment’s own
think tank Chatham House,

The
CIA director, Petraeus, was brought down by the FBI based on the
detailed unearthing and mapping of yes, the metadata, the
communications data records of who called whom from where and when
that enabled them to chart the path of the relationship with his
mistress, Paula Broadwell, to his humiliation and run him out of
office. I don’t say that as to the purpose of it, but the
capability was there and it came from Prism which is administered by
the FBI.

If it can happen to him…

Nor is this danger limited to the abuse
of power by officials. Snowden worked for Booz
Allen, an enormous private corporation, part of a growing
industrial-security complex that is recruiting from the secret
services. It will seek to hollow out the security services to
chase lucrative government revenue streams. Its loyalties will not be
to public service and this process is, arguably, the most dangerous
current threat to national security.

Why, then, the apparent complacency in
the UK that more and more seems like a pathological lethargy? I’d
suggest two reasons that undermine what can be called the moral
self-confidence essential to a democratic society.

First, the British state in Westminster
and Whitehall has subordinated itself to Washington. Paradoxically,
its desire to remain an influential actor on the world stage has
enslaved it mentally to the American system. Why did David Miliband
when he was Foreign Secretary appear to cover up British complicity
in torture? Because the revelations would have damaged the UK’s
dependability in the eyes of the US – this was the
definition of Britain’s ‘national security’. This embrace of
and desire for American approval also runs deep across the media and is embedded in the ruling political culture. It has become a kind
of disabling infantilism. When European leaders expressed fury at the
US monitoring their phones and those of their aides David Cameron,
Nick Clegg, Ed Miliband were silent. It was as if, secretly, they
were thrilled at the idea that Uncle Sam would be listening in to
them!

Second, we have seen an erosion of the
old, informal constitutional culture and its belief in British
institutions. Instead of being replaced by a democratic culture this
has permitted a politics of liberty that has become grossly
individualized. In a moving account of his passion for his chosen
country, Tom Stoppard expressed his fears for its destiny in his
recent speech accepting the PEN/Pinter prize. His list started
with surveillance. But before that he described how he had been
inspired by Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between ‘positive
freedom’, where the state provides your necessities, and the
‘negative freedom’ of individual autonomy and thinking for
oneself. For Stoppard, 'negative freedom' was the acme of liberty. Liberty, however, cannot be grounded on the absence of
restraint. As Skinner has argued in his brief and devestating if diplomatic polemic
with Berlin, Liberty before Liberalism, freedom is shared: the
loss of another’s liberty is a threat to mine. This is not
collectivism, but nor is it the market freedom of negativity.

While the negative freedom that is
lauded in official British culture can thrive without a
constitutional framework, the shared self-belief now needed to tame
and contain the surveillance state demands a basic law, so that when
we make our claims against the state we can do so in the name of our
country.

In the late 1980s this argument first
broke cover with Charter 88 and helped energise a Labour Party that
now seems numb to the point of catatonia on these issues. The call
was summed up by the slogan that we should become citizens instead of being
subjects. Today, we are moving in the opposite direction - and are turning from being subjects into suspects. This humiliating form of
subordination is hard to resist, however, if you do not have any means to make
a claim on the state in the form of the sovereignty of ‘We, the
people’. In Britain, we are subjects of a sovereignty - trapped by not having a constitution we can call
our own. Now the trap is being digitalized into electronic
custody.

This is why the Guardian’s stalwart
publication of the Snowden revelations thanks to Glenn Greewald is a
huge democratic service. We need to think through what we are learning,
assess where we go from here and above all defend those who have
printed and posted them. Monday evening is a rare chance to hear editors and others
reflect on their case and its consequences. If you can, come
along, and tell others to as well.

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